Opera 9 beta 1 close to being released

In addition to the weekly builds of Opera 9 being released, over the last couple weeks Opera has also released some mid-weekly builds in order to get more feedback and squash more bugs. If all goes well with this week’s build, the beta should be out soon.

Some of the new features in Opera 9 include Widgets, a new and improved opera:config, BitTorrent support, site specific preferences, editable integrated search, and a rewrite of important parts of the rendering engine. (It still doesn’t have the status toolbar enabled by default.)

Like this:

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Just curious … Why is the status bar not being enabled by default of any importance for this brief article?

Anonymous

April 7, 2006 at 4:11 pm

I was just about to ask the same thing…

EC

April 7, 2006 at 5:12 pm

What about EXTENSIONS?

I converted to Opera not long ago, and absolutely fell in love with the entire lifestyle of the Opera browser in lieu of some other two lettered ones (IE).
But, as of late, the Firefox browser has caught my eye, mainly because of some development work I have been doing that was easier to debug and develop with the help of some of those amazing extensions.

I really think (and hope) that one day Opera will jump in and add support for such extensions, if not for the very same extensions that are already out there for use in the Firefox browser.

I think the time is now…

Anonymous

April 8, 2006 at 5:26 am

Why the status bar is important in this article? Because the Opera browser itself is irrelevant.

opera really really really needs a backup features. A one click to compress all the mail, bookmark, settings into one file

Anonymous

April 8, 2006 at 5:52 am

whats userjs got to do with firefox extensions? you can only do so much with plain’ol javascript. Afterall, userjs is just a clone of greasemonkey.

Anonymous

April 8, 2006 at 6:54 am

First of all, UserJS is not a “clone” of Greasemonkey. It was developed independently, somewhere about the same time when Greasemonkey was created.

Second, UserJS implementation is more powerful than Greasemonkey. Even the creator of Greasemonkey has admitted it.

Third, 90% of Firefox extensions are available in Opera out of the box – OR can be done with custom buttons, panels, user scripts and widgets.

Anonymous

April 9, 2006 at 1:44 am

Well Opera 9 is a lot less than I wanted it to be. Plainly from a user point of view I do not think the newer version of Opera merits more than version number 8.60

What did I want to see (in order of importance)-
* Better M2 – IMAP support, ability to see emails written in RTF mode.
* Support for Yahoo mail (beta).
* Improvements in RSS reader (maybe I need to elaborate this)
* Separation of tooltips for the browser UI and the pages.
* MHT support
* Easier interface to add default searches. It is easier to add searches to FF. O9 allows you to add any text box to search, I think.
* Improvement to download manager, like ability to set max number of simultaneous download & queuing the rest, setting speed and right click->”open containing folder” in menu.

At present (even though I have Tech previews) –
* sometimes scrolling is not smooth
* Widget controls are primitive – I have pandora widget, I can not disable it, I can only remove it. I have to listen to music all the time O9 is open (oh wait there is a pause button)
* There is a jitter when I move forward or back, sort of like page redraw.

The status bar has nothing really to do with this article. I’ve included it in the article since (I believe) it’s something that many (if not most users) want, and for some reason Opera still has it off by default. I figured that if I bring this issue up over here, that perhaps something will be done about it. 😉

Anonymous

April 9, 2006 at 2:17 pm

If you have tool tips, what exactly does status bar help with? A tool tip can show the entire address – no matter how long. The status bar does not. Maybe I have been using Opera so long without a status bar that I am not sure if it can be used for anything else?

absolutely true about the status bar…. thats the firs tthing I do when I download opera on a new machine, turn on the status bar.. I’ve a;ways wondered why its not on by default.. they have a gazillion panels on by default but not the status bar.. go figure.

Anonymous

April 13, 2006 at 3:04 am

and in other news.. opera 8 or 9 cant display google calender, no surprise there.

Anonymous

April 17, 2006 at 2:10 pm

for google calendar – If you stop the script with the error message that your browser is not compatible, you can view the site and access the functions. Most of the stuff actually works.

On the various Yahoo and Google services, I’d guess that we’ll start seeing more Opera compatibility after Opera 9 final is out.

Both Yahoo and Google have a tendency to target features that are common to IE6 and Firefox 1, but haven’t been in Opera until version 9. Since the latest stable version of Opera is missing feature X, they either hand it lowest-common-denominator code or leave it unsupported. Either way, they don’t seem to have been testing with the Opera 9 previews, so while Opera 9 can handle the nifty features, they’re still sending code that doesn’t account for Opera’s quirks.

Once Yahoogle are convinced that Opera has the full set of capabilities that they’re trying to use, one hopes that they’ll start testing with Opera instead of just writing it off. With any luck, they’ll decide it’s worth doing when the beta comes out, rather than waiting for the final.

Is there a super drag and drop script for opera? In maxthon and firefox (with extension) you can highlight text on a webpage and then drag it on the page for a little bit which causes that browser to do a google etc search for that text.

cheesewhiz: You don’t even need a script. If you highlight text in Opera, then right-click, the drop-down menu includes items for search, dictionary, and encyclopedia lookups.

taotek

July 12, 2006 at 10:33 am

About super drag’n’drop analog:
it is very convenient just to drag a link and it opens in a new tab, but now pressing the right mouse button and choosing from a menu.
Is it possible to make the same feature in Opera?

B. gold

July 30, 2006 at 3:47 am

Ditto on the request for super drag and drop.
Mine was the same path, too – maxthon (was MyIE2),
firefox, back to maxthon until found Super Drag n Drop. The dbl-click context menu in opera 9 is ok – but not near as convenient. Super Drag and drop does it automatically in following order: goes to the URL if it finds it is one, then/else does a search using your default search engine (google for me).
I tried a 2004 hack (Enable Drag=255) no effect.
Thanks.